• Jack van Wijk , MagnaView’s VP of Scientific Affairs, is full professor at the Technical University Eindhoven and publishes frequently in the area of visualization. Jack van Wijk has won various prestigious awards in the field of visualization.

Registered Community Designs
MagnaView IPR has received three Registered Community Designs, granted by the Trademarks and Designs Office of the European Union ( http://oami.europa.eu/ ).

• Treemapped Business Graphics, in particular but not restricted to Treemapped Bar Charts, Treemapped Pie Charts, as well as Treemapped Matrix are protected by Registered Community Designs: 000394127-0001, 000394127-0002 and 000394127-0003
• The use of icons, logos, photos in Treemaps is protected by a Registered Community Design: 000589015-001, 000589015-002, 000589015-003, and 000589015-004.
• iDance is protected by a registered Community Design:

iDance
iDance is a platform for creating dances. Take a look at a demo of iDance.

PaletteView
PaletteView is a tool for analyzing color spaces. Read more about the use of color in MagnaView below. Download PaletteView here.

‘‘This piece of software will be used for the rest of my career to help me define colors!’’

J.B. Kelly - Research Analyst at University of Maryland

What lies behind the use of colors in MagnaView
In the MagnaView applications, colors are used to encode data, to highlight certain aspects of the data, or for aesthetical purposes. To achieve the intended effect, colors need to be chosen carefully.
The MagnaView applications help users make good choices for colors.

How it works
Underneath the choice of colors, is a so-called color system used. There are many color systems. An example of this is HLS (Hue, Lightness, Saturation), which is widely used in for instance Microsoft Office and Adobe Photoshop (Fig. 1).

Fig 1: Six colors that are equally light according to HLS

Fig 2: Six colors that are equally light according to CIELUV

The problem with HLS is that differences or correspondences between colors do not fit with the way humans perceive these colors, i.e. they are not perceptually uniform. An example is the ‘lightness’ of colors: Figure 1 shows colors that are supposed to be equally light according to HLS.

Fig 3: The 3D volume of the CIELUV color space. By taking a hue-slice we can inspect all colors of a single hue

In 2007, MagnaView started research on colors. The basis was formed by a more color system called CIELUV (Fig. 2), which is more in accordance with the way humans perceive color. To firstly analyze this color system, PaletteView was developed. PaletteView uses intersection slices to gain more information. This shed new light on the CIELUV color system. Using PaletteView, other hand-made palettes could be analyzed.

This secondly lead to a new method for specifying palettes. Usually, color keys are used to specify palettes. We use a higher level approach in which the appearance of the palette is specified, rather than its building blocks (“Generating Color Palettes using Intuitive Parameters” in Computer Graphics Forum, May 2008).

By tuning the six parameters number of colors, hue, brightness, saturation, contrast, and hue range the user can specify what the palette should look. It doesn’t matter how the user tunes the palette; the algorithm always yields a proper palette.

Availability
From version 3.2. of the MagnaView applications onwards, this way of generating palettes is available to MagnaView users. If you are not yet a MagnaView user, you might download a demo. The PaletteView application is available for R&D purposes.

Fig 4: A wide variety of palettes can be generated using the new technique.